Relevance to the sub: assassination of political dissidents abroad by an authoritarian regime pursuing an efficient PR strategy through international summits and sports competitions

Robert Kabera, a former military officer who fell out of favor with Paul Kagame's regime, has been found decapitated in Uganda where he had been sheltering for years. Kabera, 50, served as a sergeant-major in the powerful Rwandan Armed Forces and was a lead singer in the Army Jazz Band, which routinely tours in Africa and beyond as part of Rwanda's cultural outreach.

In 2020, he fled Rwanda after allegations of rape which he denied as fabrications by the government to sanction his dissent. Sheltering in neighboring Uganda, he worked as a musician and moonshined as an influencer with 145,000 followers on his social media platforms, where he regularly and overtly criticized the Rwandan government and Paul Kagame's political practices, corruption and authoritarianism.

Paul Kagame has ruled Rwanda since the RPF's military victory that ended the genocide perpetrated by the Hutu supremacist government and paramilitaries that saw the mass killing of 800,000 Tutsi, Twa and non-supremacist Hutu.

Kagame has been credited with pacifying Rwanda after one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century and presiding over the economic reconstruction of Rwanda, but is also criticized for heading an authoritarian regime that severely oppresses political opponents and journalists and refuses to allow other political forces to fairly compete in the political arena.

Under Kagame's rule, Rwanda got directly involved in the deadly wars in eastern Congo on the side of anti-Kinshasa rebels, and has provided support to Mozambique's authoritarian government to suppress the protests against election rigging that cemented FRELIMO's 50-year rule in 2024.

The journalism consortium Forbidden Stories released in 2024 a series of investigations revealing the depth and reach of Kagame's repressive machinery, whose security services were able to directly target, harass and even murder opponents across the African continent and into Europe.

Despite this, Kagame's Rwanda remains a choice destination for international conferences and sports events thanks to a remarkable PR campaign conducted by the Rwandan government, who expanded the cyclism competition Tour du Rwanda in the 2000s to attract tourists and sponsors, and the organization of a Formula One competition, planned for 2030.

What is the most worrying threat to liberal democracy today? Donald Trump’s kleptocratic, would-be authoritarian presidency? The semi-fascist MAGA movement’s capture of the Republican Party? Both are strong contenders, but my nominee is Alternative für Deutschland. After a recent breakthrough election win in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, this extreme-right party leads the German opinion polls and has a discernible path to national power.

AfD proposes to expel millions of people (including naturalized German citizens), take Germany out of the European Union, side with Russia against Ukraine, crack down on “anti-German” art, withhold state benefits from LGBTQ and other “deviant” families, and reconstruct the state on ethnonationalist lines. “The AfD’s legislators in the new state parliament include a former pornographer convicted of theft and men under investigation for ties to right-wing extremist groups,” writes the Brookings Institution’s Constanze Stelzenmüller in the Financial Times. “The state AfD leadership has consistently refused to disavow staffers with links to a banned neo-Nazi organization.”

That’s right, folks. We are talking about an extreme-right party rising meteorically in Germany.

Given Germany’s geographic and strategic centrality and its not-so-ancient history, can you think of anything quite as disturbing, or as bizarre? After all, Germany today is not the Weimar Republic in the 1920s, where people used wheelbarrows as wallets. Whatever challenges it faces, Germany is a brilliant national success story: rich, secure, strong, democratic, peaceable.

What in the world is going on? Why are Western publics so disillusioned with liberalism? Why gravitate to authoritarian populism, which is invariably corrupt, repressive, and incompetent? Why now, when Western countries are objectively richer and safer than any time before the end of the Cold War—if not ever?

We liberals are rightly obsessed with those questions, and a stream of recent books addresses them. I have reviewed some of them here, here, here, and here. Now come two more, one by a Nobel Prize-winning economist, the other by a British historian. One of them is a tour de force that will change the way you think about the problem. Spoiler: it’s not by the Nobelist.

Daron Acemoglu is an economist at MIT. He and collaborators Simon Johnson (a LibCon2026 panelist) and James A. Robinson won the Nobel in 2024 for their work showing how a “narrow corridor” of institutional arrangements generates conditions for prosperity. In What Happened to Liberal Democracy?, Acemoglu, writing solo, tackles the global political crisis.

In the 20th century, he argues, liberal markets and politics succeeded by dismantling “absolute power of certain groups over the rest,” creating conditions for self-government, and sparking a virtuous cycle in which technological progress, markets, and wage growth bolstered social mobility, economic prosperity, and participatory democracy.

Unfortunately, the cycle went into reverse. What he calls the “industrial compact” (“the combination of industrial-era economics and politics”) struggled while inequality, mass migration, and globalization heightened social tensions. Automation, deregulation, and the decline of unions added to the pressure on working-class well-being; and then, of course, China stormed into world markets.

As if that had not damaged the postwar industrial compact enough, liberalism “completely turned its back on the economic priorities of the less educated and has come to focus on cultural and global issues.” Worse still, liberals lost their “moral fire.” Neglecting their legacy as economic and social reformers, they became a technocratic establishment that was too smug and insular to command a mass following.

So where are we now? “History shows that when liberalism falters, its enemies rush in,” Acemoglu writes. “We are only at the beginning of this unraveling.” In his last chapter, Acemoglu argues that “if liberalism is to endure, it must be rebuilt”—and “it must rise with the working class at its heart.” To that end, he ticks off programs and ideas, such as more apprenticeships, “appropriately targeted” redistribution, “pro-worker AI,” “a common narrative” that can “bring people together,” “renewed understanding of the value of community,” and—I guess you get the idea. Every author dreads the “solutions” chapter, and this grab-bag exemplifies why.

Acemoglu has written a commendable account of the economic changes that have riven and challenged Western societies. Like many liberal critics of liberalism, however, he seems too eager to blame liberalism for—well, everything. “I believe that these noxious [antiliberal] currents are alive only as a result of liberalism’s crisis and weakness.” My italics, because ... only? It’s all our fault?

While no one disputes that liberal governments committed mistakes and oversights, none of their failings explains, much less justifies, the movement of an enviably privileged electorate like Germany’s toward a party like AfD. Up to a point, I’m all for self-critical introspection by chastened intellectuals; but when, one wonders, does self-criticism shade into self-absorption? Sure, liberals need to reform and improve; but when we see a global political wave empowering the worst kinds of opportunists and demagogues, maybe it’s not always our fault.

So it is refreshing and revelatory to turn to The Great Realignment: Why the New Right Is Here to Stay, by Stephen Davies, the author of books about Brexit, economic innovation, and empiricism (and a contributor to The UnPopulist). He, too, tackles the question of why liberalism is under threat everywhere and all at once, but he is most interested in the specific nature of the threat. “The pattern almost everywhere in the developed world is increasing success for a new kind of right-wing politics,” he writes. The question is “why this kind of politics has sprung up now and in so many places” (his italics). That, it seems to me, is the right place to start.

Like Acemoglu, Davies takes note of the disruptions that liberal democracies and markets have struggled to cope with: social media, economic globalization, mass migration, growing gaps favoring big cities over the countryside and college-educated over non-college workers, and anxiety about demographic and cultural change. Also like Acemoglu, he dings liberals for losing touch with ordinary people by prioritizing “ideas and perspectives generated in the academy” that “tended to serve the interests of a class of qualified professionals.” All of that, you’ve heard before.

Davies’ contribution is to put those developments in a much larger context. Where others see a concatenation of mistakes or failures that strained liberal democracies to the breaking point, Davies sees a playing out of political forces that nobody could have prevented or preempted. In other words, even if liberals had done everything right, it might not have mattered.

Why? Davies’ central concept is that of alignment: the organization of politics around issues that define what are usually binary debates. An alignment establishes political alliances and arguments in ways that are more or less stable, often for several generations. During these stable periods, “political identities are known and persistent.” Every so often, however, a defining conflict is resolved or becomes obsolete and a new conflict supplants it. The result is, per Davies’ title, a “great realignment.”

Major realignments have several characteristics, Davies thinks. One is that, after a while, they settle down into predictable political patterns; but in the meantime, they seem chaotic and frightening, especially to those whose mindset is stuck in the old order. For a while, nothing makes sense: radical actors and ideas come out of nowhere and surge from the margins of politics to the center; “friends and allies become enemies while deeply divided opponents suddenly find themselves allied.”

Another characteristic is that major alignments can be delayed or obstructed, but they cannot be prevented. They are driven by structural changes in societies and economies and by tectonic changes in public sentiment—not by the to-ing and fro-ing of everyday politics. When a realignment happens, politicians arise to meet the moment. If not for Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, and Marine Le Pen, someone else like them would have emerged.

Third, and a point Davies is at pains to stress: realignments are not random events or ephemeral disturbances that burn themselves out. They are about something. Even if the disrupters seem disreputable, they speak for millions and represent substantive positions on fundamental issues. Whether or not you like the new combatants and battle lines, they are (as the book’s subtitle says) “here to stay.”

What are those battle lines? Writes Davies:

The core of the present realignment is this. We are moving on from a world in which the aligning issue is how large a role government should play in the economy and in redistributing resources—capitalism versus social democracy or socialism. ... Instead, there is a new one. This is about identity and the nature of governance; the choice now is nationalism versus cosmopolitanism and globalism.

Crediting and extending David Goodhart’s 2017 book distinguishing between localist “somewheres” and cosmopolitan “anywheres,” Davies argues that recent decades saw the world divide into two groups with different sources of identity. On one side are people who see themselves as rooted in their place, nation, job, and faith; on the other, denizens of globally connected metropolises who identify with liberation from local and national constraints. In the United States, he says:

the realignment is complete. Instead of a division between Republicans and Democrats based on support for tax cuts and deregulation and smaller government on one side versus redistribution and more regulation on the other, there is now one between a nationalist party that is conservative on a range of cultural questions and a more globalist party that is more relaxed about immigration and radical on cultural questions.

We see the same divisions everywhere: multilateralism and internationalism versus nationalism; progressive versus conservative values; globalization, free trade, and relatively liberal immigration versus economic nationalism, trade protection, and reduced immigration and even mass deportation. According to Davies, this conflict will frame world politics for decades to come.

His argument, rich and fascinating as it is, has its blind spots. While Davies is right to take populist nationalism seriously as a worldview, he does not take seriously enough the populist threat to the very existence of democracy and the rule of law. (See: U.S.A., January 6, 2021.) He also takes too little account of the fact that the prescriptions of the populist right—such as protectionism, cronyism, nativism, and anti-intellectualism—are ruinous and oppressive. (See: everywhere.) His breezy confidence that “politics is not in chaos” and “will soon stabilize” seems, shall we say, premature.

Nonetheless, the implications of Davies’ argument deserve attention. One is that the conservative-libertarian alliance in support of free markets is dead. “In the new politics the dominant ‘right’ position will be one that combines nationalism and anti-globalism with economic interventionism,” he says. “To be a Thatcherite today is like being a Gladstonian Liberal in the 1920s—charming and admirable but ineffectual and unrealistic.”

Another implication is that the realignment has no reverse gear. Now that it is in place, it has redefined politics and superseded its original causes. As a result, “technocratic economics will no longer work politically.” Fattening voters’ pocketbooks can help win the next election but will not change the fundamental partisan loyalties of voters who are asking not “How am I doing?” but “Whose country is it?”

If Davies is right that the political paradigm has shifted, then it’s no longer the economy, stupid! Building more houses and improving health care, while worth doing, will not catalyze a new majority for Democrats and other parties of the center-right and center-left. Instead, the main battle is over culture and identity. Germany’s AfD is betting on that, and as of now it is winning.

Interesting paper looking into whether the one-off billionaire tax will be a net positive to the state's coffers.

TLDR; "The present value of permanently lost income tax collections from departures more than offsets the one-time wealth tax revenue, yielding a net present value of negative $38.9 billion."

The White House has blocked the transfer of Patriot missiles to Ukraine, US officials have said.
The transfer of interceptor missiles from countries friendly to Ukraine requires the approval of Pete Hegseth, the US defence secretary.
While Mr Hegseth has not formally rejected the deals involving countries other than the US – as the manufacturer, it retains control over the weapons – he has not completed the steps required to approve them, sources told The Washington Post.

Regional security officials received a sobering American message as they gathered in the Qatari capital and braced for a potential new round of escalation between the U.S. and Iran: They need to look out for themselves.

Tom Barrack, the U.S. ambassador to Turkey and President Trump’s special envoy for Syria and Iraq, said the grand bargains that have underpinned global security for decades are undergoing major transformation, and countries in the Middle East and elsewhere should focus on securing themselves via regional partnerships.

“America as the guarantor to the world, for the last 80 years, it is no longer there,” Barrack said at the Global Security Forum in Doha, an annual summit that brings together top security officials and experts from around the world. “What’s happening in this administration is not an abandonment. It’s a message for realignment.”

“And that message is like raising a teenager. It’s not easy,” he said.

Arrangements forged in the wake of World War II—essentially a quid pro quo whereby the U.S. provided security in exchange for oil—no longer fit Washington’s imperatives, Barrack said. Americans don’t want to sacrifice their lives for the Middle East, and Gulf states know the U.S. can’t assure their security, he said.

He said the region is right to pivot toward smaller and more diversified alliances like the new defense pact between Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey. But he acknowledged the transition would be uncertain.

“We don’t have a playbook,” he said. “We’re all on audibles. We can go one play at a time.”

Trump administration officials have delivered similar calls for self reliance at security gatherings in Europe and Asia.

Gulf states tried and failed to talk Trump out of going to war with Iran. Barrack’s message lands as they worry the U.S. will retreat from the conflict, leaving them to deal with an angered and newly aggressive foe. Many are questioning whether they can rely on the U.S. as a partner even as they recognize there are no good alternatives to its military technology and backing.

Barrack said the war launched by the U.S. and Israel in late February brought unexpected consequences, likening the Middle East to a Rubik’s Cube whereby a single move can change the whole picture. He said there are lessons to be learned and limits to U.S. power.

“Every time we try and intervene and change the person or the regime, it seems to have been a mistake,” he said, pointing to Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan.

American administrations have long hoped to disentangle the country from the Middle East without success. Even now, the Trump administration is delivering a mixed message.

Last year, the U.S. added Saudi Arabia as a major non-NATO ally, a list that includes Gulf neighbors Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait. Trump also continues to build up forces around Iran. The military is bringing in a third aircraft carrier and an additional Marine expeditionary unit, and is resupplying forces in case needed for a renewed fight.

“We’re not leaving,” Barrack said.

Both Trump and Iranian officials have signaled they’re preparing for a possible resumption of large-scale hostilities after a monthslong impasse in diplomacy. The U.S. has ramped up economic pressure on the regime, but that has so far failed to bring about a breakthrough, and regional allies are bracing for the possibility of another round of fighting that could potentially hit sensitive energy infrastructure.

Gulf countries are looking nervously at Saudi Arabia, where missile and drone attacks by Iran-backed Houthi militants have damaged energy facilities and the international airport in the capital, Riyadh.

Saudi Arabia appealed to the U.S. to intervene militarily, but Trump has limited the country’s role to providing intelligence and guidance. The damage done by the Houthis’ attacks has heightened concerns about the region’s ability to fend off further missile and drone incursions after burning through air defenses earlier in the war.

Barbara Leaf, a top Middle East envoy under former President Joe Biden, said regional allies are already moving away from dependence on U.S. protection but there are limits to an American retreat.

“They’re already doing, I think, a lot of logical things—diversification of security partnerships and security defense equipment resources,” she said, also speaking in Doha. “I think we simply haven’t seen where things will ultimately go yet, and therefore how these regional partners are best suited to defend themselves, but they do need big partners like the U.S.”

Ali Vaez, an Iran analyst at International Crisis Group, said the region hears different messages from different U.S. officials, which hurts America’s credibility and leads countries to hedge their bets.

“At the end of the day, the United States will remain highly influential and involved in the region’s defense, but it has proven to be clearly insufficient,” he said.

Romania’s parliament has elected the independent diplomat Luca Niculescu as the new prime minister. Prior to this, the country had been without a functional government for months.

Following months of political deadlock, the Romanian parliament has approved the pro-European government led by the independent diplomat Luca Niculescu. According to Romanian media, 280 members of the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate voted in his favor, while 58 voted against him. This means that the EU and NATO member state once again has a prime minister, ending a government crisis that had lasted more than five months. The vote marked the fourth attempt to elect a new head of government.

Niculescu’s administration is a social-democratic minority government that also includes several technocrats. Twelve of his 18 ministers hail from the left-wing party, while the other six are non-partisan technocrats. Although the liberal-conservative PNL supported his election as prime minister, it remains an opposition party. Niculescu must secure a majority in parliament on a case-by-case basis. He was nominated by President Nicușor Dan.

"Romania needs a government with full capacity to act," Niculescu said in parliament. "We live in an increasingly uncertain world. There is a war on Romania's border, and the threats to European security are greater than they were just a few years ago."

Ousting of the predecessor

Niculescu previously served as State Secretary at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, most recently working on Romania’s accession process to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Prior to that, he held various diplomatic posts, including serving as ambassador—most notably in France.

Niculescu’s predecessor, Ilie Bolojan of the PNL, had been ousted in a vote of no confidence in May, remaining in office only on an interim basis thereafter. He had attempted to initiate reforms and austerity measures that proved highly unpopular in the country. He was ultimately brought down by the Social Democrats (PSD)—who were part of the governing coalition—and the far-right, pro-Russian party AUR.

His succession proved difficult. One candidate nominated by the president withdrew his application before the vote; another was rejected by parliament in June, and a third met the same fate at the end of September. The president refused to call for new elections.

Translated by Google Translate, mistakes are my own.

https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2026/10/20/korea-South-Korea-Ukraine-withdraw-embassy-POW/1181792485499/

Taiwan catalysed an economic boom through state allocation of resources which Milton is known to oppose

This post is an update on the Cyril Ramaphosa's perilous path to renew the ANC.

A few days ago I posted an effortpost explaining Ramaphosa's plan to fix ANC run municipalities by centralising the selection of mayors in the national body of the party, rather than leaving it to regions. The ANC opened nominations even to non-members, and promised a mayoral selection process based on qualification and professionalism.

These changes were opposed by regions, who twice managed to prevent the announcement of the selected candidates. In terms of Acemoglu thought, this is a fight between centralising forces and decentralising forces, as in The Narrow Corridor.

The stalemate saw the ANC submit its candidate lists so late that some lists were submitted incorrectly (they submitted the lists but didn'thit "submit as final"), putting the ANC at risk of being unable to properly contest six municipalities. That blunder was taken to court and the court has now sided with the ANC - their incorrect submission will still be accepted and their candidates can run.

Ramaphosa's side have now backed down slightly. The national ANC have said they will not announce the selected candidates. They don't want to sow division in the party before the election, and are worried that the losing candidates' supporters will not vote. The ANC is already behind the DA in big cities, and is at risk of losing majorities in other municipalities. They can't risk it.

Curiously, they don't say that they have abandoned the process as a whole, or that the selected candidates will not be installed. Just that they will not announce them. This is what I said in my Cupcake post: you never get the "decisive" leadership, just endless compromise right up until the very last mimute.

The relevance of this for this sub is that it is a live case study of the dynamics described in Acemoglu's The Narrow Corridor. A corrupt party with an absent leviathan is centralising, but the decentralising forces are pushing back. Can they reach a balance that reforms the party? Or will the stalemate and the fighting destroy the ANC entirely?

It is also interesting because it shows what I have always said about the ANC: they are institutionalists at heart, corrupted or not. The ANC believe that the way you solve problems is through rules - making them, changing them or scrapping them. Unlike the majority of South Africa's political parties, they are actually doing playing the game of politics: building coalitions of people who disagree and fighting over rules and processes that distribute power even risking the destruction of their party (one way or the other).

South Africa's small, stagnant parties (small than UDM) need to learn from the ANC how to actually play the game of politics, as messy, risky, and chaotic as it may be. The small parties are not like this and that is why they're small.

I am posting this now, rather than waiting for the final outcome of the ANC stalemate, because the value is in observing the system as the various incentives play out, rather than to do retrospective analysis and pretend it was all obvious.

The local government elections are in two weeks.

Beijing is expected to become "super-aged" by 2035. Around a third of the population will be 60 or above.

Currently, Beijing has a quarter of its population aged 60 or above. The city's government has raised pension to support the elderly.

China's population has shrunk since 2022 and is ageing rapidly. This has affected plans to boost domestic consumption and lower debt. The government has spent 180 billion yuan ($26.92 billion) to boost births.